95. Thief on the Cross

Eyolf Østrem points out that “the riff that runs through this song is basically the same as in Cover Down [Pray] Through, and several other gospel period songs.” What impresses me is that I can’t tell—which can, perhaps, be attributed more to Dylan’s inventiveness as a performer and band leader than to the weakness of my musical ear.

Granted, the riff here—unlike Cover Down, Pray Through’s—doesn’t leave much of a mark. Nor is the structure or basic arrangement anything groundbreaking for the period. What I love about Thief on the Cross are all the other expected variables: the commanding atmosphere, the grimness and fire of both tune and band, Dylan’s fantastic singing, the energy and passion of the backing vocals, and such details of the otherwise “identikit arrangement” (quoth Heylin) as the fierce barrage of crash cymbals and toms, courtesy of the 1981 band’s two drummers, and the keyboard in the left channel that sounds as if Mark Knopfler were playing the guitar.

When Chadwick Stokes was fronting the band State Radio (2003-2012), he would frequently introduce new songs into their live sets. These songs would be pretty rough. The refrain would be intact, and the vocal melodies in the verses, and the basic structure; but the verse lyrics were adlibbed and changed from performance to performance. The bass player Chuck Fay and the drummer Maddog Najarian would still be working out their parts. The songs usually gained a bridge or an intro or outro or something else special before Chad decided they were done.

As someone who went to see State Radio play live fifty times between 2006 and 2011, and who religiously followed every live recording that the State Radio fan community managed to make and upload to the Live Music Archive, it was a privilege and great fun to be privy to the evolution of fledgling songs by a master writer.

Dylan hasn’t done this sort of thing much. Well, to be precise, he treated his finished songs this way in the late 1980s and early 1990s, making up many of the verse lyrics on the spot, or just mumbling his way through them. But he hasn’t often introduced a song live before it was finished. Not that it hasn’t happened: there’s Tell Me Momma in 1966, Seven Days in 1976, Are You Ready? in 1979/80. And also Thief on the Cross.

Clinton Heylin writes of the song that “it seems to have been unveiled on this occasion for a specific reason—a possible live album. A multitrack had been brought in to record both New Orleans shows for a historic document of the band he was about to disband, and in this instance Dylan was looking to capture the song on its very first performance.” And capture it he did, even if it’s in a not-quite-ready state, with the verse lyrics so much anybody’s guess that even the usually bat-eared Østrem takes recourse in brackets, ellipses, and question marks. But it’s charming to hear Bob morph and muff the lines just as Chad would do with State Radio’s new songs a few decades later. And for all the indistinctness, the quaver in Bob’s voice and the coiled intensity of his singing are real.

Besides, he always returns to that marvelous refrain, which gives the imagination plenty to work with: “There’s a thief on the cross / His chances are slim / There’s a thief on the cross / I want to talk to him.” Not until Michael Gira disbanded Swans to form the Angels of Light in 1998 would there be a band as capable of conjuring darkness and brimstone as vividly and intensely as Dylan’s Gospel players. And for Thief on the Cross, on its one performance in mid-November 1981, a mere handful of shows away from the end of this vivid chapter of Dylan’s career, conjure it they do. Somehow it’s as if they put Golgotha right before your eyes.